GNOME does not load theme after innstalling NVIDIA non-free driver

[Halvor Lyche Strandvoll]

I innstalled the NVIDIA driver and when reboot computer it does not load the Ambiance theme, i try switch theme manually but it does not work probatly (See screenshoot). I am waiting for a fix, my desktop looks really ugly.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.10
Package: gdm 2.30.5-0ubuntu4
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.35-22.35-generic 2.6.35.4
Uname: Linux 2.6.35-22-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sat Oct 30 09:30:42 2010
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" - Release amd64 (20101007)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=nb_NO:nb:no_NO:no:nn_NO:nn:en
 LANG=nb_NO.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: gdm

[Lars Daviknes (larsdav)]

I run ATI driver, and this bug affects me too.

[Halvor Lyche Strandvoll (halvors)]

Can we get a fix soon? Can someone look into it?

[Halvor Lyche Strandvoll (halvors)]

It works for me and my friend Lars Daviknes now. Dont know why, but it's only work :)

[Halvor Lyche Strandvoll (halvors)]

Oh, now it happend when i installed the "unity" netbook interface...

[Victor Vargas (kamus)]

Would be really helpful if you can attach some log files to your report like /var/log/Xorg.0.log /var/log/syslog and .xsession-errors

[Halvor Lyche Strandvoll (halvors)]

Here is Xorg.0.log

[Halvor Lyche Strandvoll (halvors)]

Here is syslog

[Halvor Lyche Strandvoll (halvors)]

Here is .xsession-errors

[Halvor Lyche Strandvoll (halvors)]

Hope this bug can be svolved, but also. I get this bug when i have installed "unity". And i have also got it when install Nvidia driver, but didn't remember, maybe i had "unity" installed... But didn't think so.

[Halvor Lyche Strandvoll (halvors)]

This issue is still not svolved i have been waiting a long time for a fix, does i need to switch to other OS?

Now i run vanilla GNOME + Nvidia driver, with all updates.

Please help me!

[Sam Ennuie (lordboboss)]

Hello All,
I've the same issue...

As far as I can remember, I've met already this bug in past with an older distro (ubuntu 9.xx ?).
Since the official 10.10 release, I've intalled ubuntu on my (slow) hard drive and I've never been faced with this behaviour (AMD64 -Alternate install & Nvidia proprietary driver).
Everything was great graphicaly until I re-installed the full system on a SSD drive (always with the proprietary nvidia driver).
This bug appeared yesterday and is still present on my system (that's really ugly).
Sometimes, a Logoff and Logon under gnome fix this issue (totaly random).

The boot time has been improved a lot (3-5 times) with the SSD drive, my opinion is a process has not enough time to start, or something like that.

I hope this will give you some clues.
Have an idea of wich process to manualy restart ?

Kind regards

[Sam Ennuie (lordboboss)]

Here's my lspci

[Sam Ennuie (lordboboss)]

the Xorg.0.log

[Halvor Lyche Strandvoll (halvors)]

I got it first time when i installed on SSD drive. But i have got it on Hard Drive too, as Sam Ennuie says "Sometimes, a Logoff and Logon under gnome fix this issue (totaly random)." always is the same.

[Halvor Lyche Strandvoll (halvors)]

Sam Ennuie, at the top of this page, click on "This bug affects me"

[Halvor Lyche Strandvoll (halvors)]

When i run this command in Terminal after boot, it seems like it works, but GNOME fails to load theme on startup:

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart

[Sam Ennuie (lordboboss)]

I Tried 5 times : "sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart" ... and "sudo stop gdm" ... wait 10 sec... "sudo start gdm" ...
rebooted and repeated the same sequence again, but without more luck.
As you suggested me, I clicked on "this bug affects me" - thanks for this advice.

[Sam Ennuie (lordboboss)]

As you can see, Icon theme is not loaded properly.

[Halvor Lyche Strandvoll (halvors)]

Exactly same issue as me (Also the screenshot) yesterday the "sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart" worked for me, but not today...

Do you think its somthing wrong with my SSD? What SSD are you running? My SSD is Corsair Force Series F120

[Sam Ennuie (lordboboss)]

My SSD drive is an intel X25-M (G2 Postville) 80Gb, but it's very reliable (I have it for months, having many intensive IO on KVM files).
Really, I don't believe the disk is wrong. If the disk was bad, we would have a lot of other bugs .
I'm making some tests with a new user account, and trying to relaunch some processes until I find the good one (metacity --replace, gtk-window-decorator --replace ... etc.)

[Halvor Lyche Strandvoll (halvors)]

I think it's not the SSD, only a bug a place who affects SSD or/and eventually NVIDIA users.

I asked about your SSd because iif we had the same, maybe it was something there...

Hope somebody will fix this issue soon.

[Halvor Lyche Strandvoll (halvors)]

Seems like it works for me now, does it works for you Sam Ennuie (After update)?

Maybe it is that it randomly work, but it has happend 5 times with no problems, now today.

halvors.

[Sam Ennuie (lordboboss)]

It's not fixed for me, after a few hours the bug came back . Finaly I decided to give a chance to the open source driver "Nouveau". The performance are quite good, even when watching flash video. All I'm loosing are some cosmetic effects when moving windows, however it's still better that having weird icons.

[Halvor Lyche Strandvoll (halvors)]

How so i install Nouveau?

[Sam Ennuie (lordboboss)]

Nouveau is available for nvidia cards by default when you install Ubuntu.
I can give you some tips to switch back to this driver, but please don't forget I can NOT garantee it will work fine for your video card.
So the steps are :

1- Make a backup of /etc/X11/xorg.conf
2- Be sure you'll have access to internet, it might be necessary to download back the Nvidia proprietary driver. And the risk, if no driver can be loaded, is you'll have to do it from a bash console with no wireless network.
3- Uninstall all installed packages dealing with nvidia :
      3.1: get the list : "dpkg -l | grep nvidia"
      3.2: remove a package :"sudo apt-get remove nvidia-xxxxx --purge"
      3.3: repeat the remove command until your list gets empty.
4- Before reboot, delete /etc/X11/xorg
5- Reboot, Xorg server will make for you the settings for your video card.

If something's going wrong, reinstall nvidia package and restore xorg.conf

[Brett Hoerner (bretthoerner)]

Are we sure this is an nvidia issue? I would assume it's a race condition because the SSD is so fast.

I also have this issue on an Intel X25-M. I can try Noveau but it's too slow to use regularly, I think.

[Halvor Lyche Strandvoll (halvors)]

I don't know, but it happend only when use Nvidia driver.

The Noveau is to slow for me, also games ;)

This bug it's 2 month's old, no Ubuntu people seems to try to svolve it...

[Antoine Cotten (antoineco)]

I've had the same problem after using the "Repair broken package" option from the restore console.
This command saved me and restored my Gnome environment like it should be :

$ sudo rm -rv ~/.gconf/

Then you'll need re-apply your Gnome theme and Compiz, if you made any modification to the default conf.

[Antoine Cotten (antoineco)]

Ah, and don't forget to reboot after using that command ;)

[Halvor Lyche Strandvoll (halvors)]

Should Ubuntu team release a fix for this?

[Ricardo Sansores Aguilar (rsansores)]

I see this problem in two different computers. Like Sam Ennuie says I think this is a timing problem, In my case the problem presents during the first login after pc power on (the login process is a little longer at this time) if I logout and login again the theme works just fine. (the second login is a little quicker)

[Halvor Lyche Strandvoll (halvors)]

I have the problem randomly, most of us. This problem is related to SSD and to fast bootup time...

[Halvor Lyche Strandvoll (halvors)]

Also logout anf login does not work.

[Enslaven00bs (enslaven00bs)]

I think this is an issue with the SSD. I have the same problem on my CR-48 and it's pretty much a fresh install of Ubuntu 10.10

[Tuomas Järvensivu (tuomjarv)]

This could be a race condition but nothing SSD - specific. I was able to reproduce this reliably on my brand new Lenovo W510 - laptop.

Just now I was able work around the problem by removing /etc/X11/xorg.conf, restarting, and rerunning 'sudo nvidia-xconfig'. This after I had installed latest drivers from ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates.

I've got:

nvidia-current:
  Installed: 270.29-0ubuntu1~maverick~xup2
  Candidate: 270.29-0ubuntu1~maverick~xup2
  Version table:
 *** 270.29-0ubuntu1~maverick~xup2 0
        500 http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates/ubuntu/ maverick/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     260.19.06-0ubuntu1 0
        500 http://fi.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ maverick/restricted amd64 Packages

nvidia-current-modaliases:
  Installed: 270.29-0ubuntu1~maverick~xup2
  Candidate: 270.29-0ubuntu1~maverick~xup2
  Version table:
 *** 270.29-0ubuntu1~maverick~xup2 0
        500 http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates/ubuntu/ maverick/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     260.19.06-0ubuntu1 0
        500 http://fi.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ maverick/main amd64 Packages

nvidia-settings:
  Installed: 270.29-0ubuntu1~maverick~xup1
  Candidate: 270.29-0ubuntu1~maverick~xup1
  Version table:
 *** 270.29-0ubuntu1~maverick~xup1 0
        500 http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates/ubuntu/ maverick/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     260.19.06-0ubuntu1 0
        500 http://fi.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ maverick/main amd64 Packages

OpenGL vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
OpenGL renderer string: Quadro FX 880M/PCI/SSE2
OpenGL version string: 3.3.0 NVIDIA 270.29

I can provide /var/log/Xorg.0.log, /var/log/syslog and .xsession-errors if the problem re-occurs.

[Tuomas Järvensivu (tuomjarv)]

I was able to reproduce the issue on the next boot and after this the removal /etc/X11/xorg.conf didn't work either.

Attaching /var/log/Xorg.0.log, /var/log/syslog and .xsession-errors in logs-110301.tar.gz. Hope it helps to resolve the situation.

[Sam Ennuie (lordboboss)]

I did this morning a fresh install of my system (with an AMD64 Alternative install CD-ROM).
After a full update and reboot (apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade), I've installed the proprietary driver.
This bug appeared immediatly ...

My feeling stays it's a bad timing issue between the launch of many processes...
There's a tool which provide graphics and logs about how the system boots: bootchart

it's simple to install :
sudo apt-get install bootchart
You've just to reboot after and look in /var/log/bootchart

We should get some interresting .png to post here.

Regards

[Tuomas Järvensivu (tuomjarv)]

Here's a hack that solved the problem for me:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-settings-daemon/+bug/649809/comments/68

Naturally, now the desktop takes 2s more to startup but at least it works. Next step is to tune the 2s down to the smallest delay that still works :)...

[Sam Ennuie (lordboboss)]

@Tuomas
I'm testing this hack. It seems promising but I would wait some days to confirm.

[Sam Ennuie (lordboboss)]

I confirm this hack works very well for me.

[Halvor Lyche Strandvoll (halvors)]

This need to be fixed in natty.

[Jeff Lane  (bladernr)]

This appears to actually be a duplicate of 649809, so marking as such...